Jurisdiction - Chapter 2 - EU-PIL: European Union Private International Law in Contract and Tort

Joseph Lookofsky is the Professor of Obligations and Private International Law at the University of Copenhagen. He is a native of New York, USA, where he began his professional career as in-house legal counsel for United Artists Corporation. He went to Denmark in 1973, studied Danish law, and joined the University Law Faculty in 1981. Professor Lookofsky has taught at Duke University Law School and has been a Visiting Scholar at New York University School of Law.

Ketilbjørn Hertz is Legal Advisor with the Ministry of Justice, Denmark. He received degrees from the University of Copenhagen, cand.jur. in 1993 and Ph.D. in law in 1998. In 2007 he completed the Cycle international court at the Ecole nationale d' administration in Strasbourg, France.

PDF188.29 KB

$40.00

Description:

Originally from EU-PIL: European Union Private International Law in Contract and Tort

Preview Page

2.1.1. Jurisdiction to Adjudicate
Jurisdiction to adjudicate
When a court in a given State (X) is asked to decide a given commercial dispute between two private contracting parties (A and B), the first issue to be resolved is whether that court has jurisdiction to adjudicate the dispute (Ch. 1.3). A court which has jurisdiction to adjudicate has the authority and the power to decide the case brought before it. If the court lacks jurisdiction, it has no such authority or power, and it must therefore dismiss the case without making a decision on the merits.

Jurisdiction to adjudicate is always a fundamental consid-eration, in both domestic and international contexts. Although the focus in this chapter concerns jurisdiction in disputes with an international element, we can begin with a domestic exam-ple (similar to Illustration 1a in Ch. 1.3):

Illustration 2a: Seller A (in State X) and buyer B (in State X) make a contract for the delivery of certain goods in X on January 2nd. The contract specifies the nature of the goods to be delivered, as well as the price to be paid, but it does not designate a forum for the resolution of disputes which might arise. When A delivers the goods on January 3rd, B refuses to accept or pay for them. A’s efforts to settle the dispute amicably fail, and A asks a lawyer to com-mence legal proceedings against B in a court in State X.